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Paul Miller

As you’ve probably noticed, the 2012 Olympics are underway in London right now. A massive logistical exercise and a global spectacle, the Games have also given the BBC another opportunity to impress with their semantic technology skills. And impress they most certainly do. Only, I can’t help feeling this was a missed opportunity for a…

Early in 2011, I wrote a piece here on SemanticWeb.com which explored the relationship between Semantic Technologies and super-computing’s venerable rock star, Cray. Then, earlier this year, Cray spun out a new division to focus upon exploring massive graph databases; something which should resonate with the semantic technology community. The new division — YarcData — differentiates itself…

Daniel Tunkelang, Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn, delivered the final keynote at SemTechBiz in San Francisco this morning, exploring the way in which “semantics emerge when we apply the right analytical techniques to a sufficient quality and quantity of data.” Daniel began by offering his key takeaways for the presentation; Communication trumps knowledge representation. Communication…

Jay Myers at Best Buy has been working with semantic technologies for a number of years. Traditional retailers like Best Buy are looking for opportunities to survive and grow, as competition increases and margins grow ever-narrower. Semantic Web and Linked Data solutions are part enabling transformation, even inside traditional offline retailers.

Steve Harris, CTO of UK-based Garlik, opened the keynotes at SemTechBiz here in San Francisco Tuesday. Garlik was acquired by Experian in December 2011, and Garlik’s semantically-powered products are gradually being integrated into the Experian portfolio. Steve begins by stressing that Garlik “wasn’t a semantic web company” per se, but that they always planned to…

The eighth west coast Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) got underway here in San Francisco today, with an opening session that tried to guide attendees through the coming week of sometimes massively parallel sessions. Up on stage, Programme co-chairs Tony Shaw and Dave McComb were joined by Thematix Partners’ Elisa Kendall and SemanticWeb.com’s very own Eric…

I’m a fan of the waterfowl model of semantic technology. Clever semantics — as well as ‘advanced’ search boxes, arcane query syntax, and consumer interfaces that require user training — can paddle away as frantically as they like, but only while hidden well below the waterline. SPARQL, SKOS and SQL really shouldn’t be visible to most users…

Remember the days before Wikipedia had all the answers? We looked things up in libraries, referring to shelf-filling encyclopaedias. We bought CD-ROMs (remember them?) full of facts and pictures and video clips. We asked people. Sometimes, school home work actually required some work more strenuous than a cut and paste. We went about our business without remembering…

Earlier this week I spent an enjoyable hour on the phone, discussing the work done by a venerable world-class museum in making data about its collections available to a new audience of developers and app-builders. Much of our conversation revolved around consideration of obstacles and barriers, and the most intractable of those proved something of…

Two posts here on SemanticWeb.com over the past few days resonated with themes to which I seem to return with increasing frequency. First, Angela Guess pointed to a GigaOM interview with fellow Semantic Link podcaster Andraž Tori, then Jennifer Zaino picked up on the Global Futures Forecast’s [PDF] enthusiasm for ‘the Semantic Web.’ Andraž is…